Tag: Non-partisan blog posts

Soon No More Home And Garden TV

As the new ditigal TV world starts to nudge above the horizon, it is good to see the CTRC do something useful short of the dream of its own extinguishment. As some point before I leave this mortal coil, I may be able to buy cable TV without the 34 channels I never never never watch:

As the industry shifts from analog to digital transmission, which provides a high-definition TV signal through a set-top box, cable companies have sought to sell channels individually. However, in a show of support for analog cable networks concerned that their audiences may plunge, the CRTC said the tiered system must be kept in place on digital cable until 2013. If cable providers have transferred more than 85 per cent of their subscribers to digital after 2010, that system can be dropped. The tiers have often frustrated consumers who would like certain stations but do not want to be pay for those they don’t want…While Canadian regulators are making the shift from analog to digital cable over a broader period of time, the U.S. government has more aggressive plans, setting a Feb. 17, 2009, deadline to end analog TV broadcasts.

The next step of course is allowing any channel broadcast anywhere in the world to be available to me. All I want is the right to watch TV from India or Fiji as I have been able to listen to their radio through the miracle of the international broadcast bands of shortwave radio. You can tell by my internationalist style around these parts.

The Five Dollar Station

One of the reasons radio is so good is radio is extremely cheap:

The transmission equipment, costing just over $1, may be the cheapest in the world. But the local people definitely love it. On a balmy morning in India’s northern state of Bihar, young Raghav Mahato gets ready to fire up his home-grown FM radio station. Thousands of villagers, living in a 20km (12 miles) radius of Raghav’s small repair shop and radio station in Mansoorpur village in Vaishali district, tune their $5 radio sets to catch their favourite station.

The real problem radio (and broadcast TV) faces is there are only so many spots on the dial. There is already talk in the US about how switching to digital TV is going cost homeowners masses of money to replace perfectly good TV sets but it is moving ahead in under 3 years:

Manufacturers, broadcasters, cable and satellite companies and accessory developers are rushing to complete the transition to digital high definition before Feb. 17, 2009, the date the U.S. government has set for termination of all analog broadcasts. In January 2008, about a year before the HDTV transition takes place, the analog channels will be auctioned to the highest bidders. Proceeds from the sales are expected to top $10 billion, with $7.3 billion going to the U.S. Treasury. For those who haven’t bought an HDTV set by the 2009 deadline, the government plans to provide $1.5 billion in subsidies to owners of older sets for converter boxes that will transform the digital signals to analog.

All to avoid a crackle or a shadow on the screen and maybe squeeze more onto the broadcast band. But it is to be seen whether the public reception of digital TV will be the same as digital radio. If over the next three years the 20 year promise of convergence gets a little more traction, there may be a significant sector who won’t make the leap. Interesting to note that my favorite media source these days runs on something like 2 bucks a year per listener. Not that far off young Raghav Mahato’s business model.

What To Do, Ralph?

What to do when your surplus reaches 10 billion? If it is in Federal coffers everyone says it’s not government money – give it to me, pay the debt, do this, do that. But when it is in Alberta’s hands it is not ours. It doesn’t really seem to be Albertans given the lack of public use the windfall from we buyers of fuel. Given that the price will only keep going up and given there is anywhere from a 50 to 200 year supply needing digging up…what to do with it all? Harper appears intent on removing that wealth from the equalization formula, too, while others foot the bill. Maybe they could create the Arctic navy.

String Fever

The Rukster has reminded me of my early steps into bluegrass. I wrote a brief summary of my place in my pickin’ and grinnin’ edjification:

I am following a similar path in bluegrass discovery, Peter, and I can heartily recommend String Fever on NCPR Thursdays 4 to 6 your time. It’s a local show on my local NPR station with an excellent name which it has inspired me to declare 2006 the year of the mandolin, but only if I learn ten licks on the guitar. All very diddly-diddly. Perhaps you now need to pick yourself a bluegrass name like “Slim” or “Del” if only to keep it private in your own thoughts.

I daydream now of mandolins and imagine myself like these folk in a future I am not certain can be attained. The other day I learned of the existence of the mandocellos and other points on the mandolin sliding scale. I have bought books of tablature with titles like Hot Licks for Bluegrass Guitar. I have a plan. I will go to Old Forge on the way home from Easter in Portland. I will pick up a mandolin and play a lick and say “that is one sweet mandolin” and I will buy it. How better to welcome my 43rd year later that week.

This all, however, may go off the rails as I learned last evening that I am going to see Queen in Toronto in three weeks with the brothers to renew our periodic rocking out as with Elvis Costello in July 2003 and the Pixies in November 2004.

How Odd, Leah

How odd:

My own problem with the blogosphere is not that it’s selling out to the mainstream, but that most of it is spectacularly boring. The dominant quality is tedium: writers without editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers to keep them in check. As Butterworth succinctly puts it: “If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.”

Given that I basically agree with that quotation (despite its horrendous, overly ripened condition) as recent discussions will confirm, I was saddened by the reference to David Eddie, author of the excellent Chump Change of about a decade ago:

But this doesn’t hold up in all cases. Take my friend and peer David Eddie. A Toronto-based novelist, journalist and screenwriter, Eddie maintains a blog at http://www.davideddie.com even though he invariably has several other professional writing projects on the go. When I ask him (slightly incredulously) why on Earth he would bother to write down his opinions for free, he shrugs. “It’s a good way to limber up. You get up in the morning, fire up a blog, write the thing in 15 minutes and then you know what’s on your mind. I think it was Nabokov who said, ‘How do I know what’s on my mind until I write it down?’ “

Unfortunately, the fact checkers failed this time to note that Mr. Eddie’s blog has been dead since Monday, October 17, 2005. What is the word for the status of one’s limber if not upped for four months?

Never mind. Soon it will be again as retro hip to say you blog as it is now to say they are worthless.

Many Teachable Moments To Come

An appointment ripe for Frank magazine if ever there was one:

Fresh faces to the party were intentionally not assigned critics’ roles, according to a party spokeswoman, although rumoured Liberal leadership candidate and Harvard scholar Michael Ignatieff will assume an associate’s role under Human Resources and Skills critic Geoff Regan.

Mr. Graham said the appointees will keep a sharp eye on the new Tory ministers.

Sammy Pepys

The ever excellent John Gushue (no relation) notes today is the 383rd birthday of Samuel Pepys, the diarist and Minister of the English government in the 1660s. He also notes the live blogging of his famous diary. Yesterday, 344 years ago, Sammy had a bad day but one that interestingly illustrates the problem of avoiding the service of a warrant of sorts circa 1662:

One time I went up to the top of Sir W. Batten’s house, and out of one of their windows spoke to my wife out of one of ours; which methought, though I did it in mirth, yet I was sad to think what a sad thing it would be for me to be really in that condition. By and by comes Sir J. Minnes, who (like himself and all that he do) tells us that he can do no good, but that my Lord Chancellor wonders that we did not cause the seamen to fall about their ears: which we wished we could have done without our being seen in it; and Captain Grove being there, he did give them some affront, and would have got some seamen to have drubbed them, but he had not time, nor did we think it fit to have done it, they having executed their commission…

Man Is The Measure Of All Things

Here is my half-baked unified theory essay based largely on idle car driving and long meeting daydreaming. Entire chunks could be rewritten and reversed, deleted even. I am too lazy to edit it any more and I am note convinced myself but, thought I, what the heck. I’m posting it for comment but given that I am calling it half-baked I would expect that the comment would not be of the “yor a moeron” sort. Pick out what you like, mix and match, compare and contrast:

I don’t know why the opening of Jane Taber’s column in the Globe and Mail last Saturday has clung to the back of my mind:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper spent last Saturday night at 24 Sussex Dr. fiddling with the TV, trying desperately to find the channel that carried Ben and Rachel’s favourite show, The Forest Rangers. It was the Harper family’s first Saturday night at the Prime Minister’s official residence — the family of four and their two beloved cats moved in just two days before — and the cable wasn’t hooked up. “I told Stephen I would arrange the channels on Monday, and he said, ‘No, let’s do it right now,’ ” Laureen Harper wrote in an e-mail this week. The Prime Minister proceeded to call the cable company…

It is not a sour thought at the sight of a Dad trying without any luck to figure out the electronics or a hapless moment for the new PM that saddens me. It’s that it was The Forest Rangers. Secretly, I hope it is a remake I have not heard of but I suspect it is that same show that was never part of my growing up – because even at 42 it was before my time. I suppose what makes me really sad is that in the last four and a half decades of entertainment communications there is nothing better for a couple of kids to watch than the show that made The Beachcombers seem like Shakespeare – even if their parents hold a pretty tight rein on the TV’s remote control. But I doubt it. Who would remake the Forest Rangers? Who now could?

Is this another post about the false promise of recent changes in mass communications? I suppose it is. This weekend, taking in a movie in a 1930s cinema as well as an excellent live hockey game, I was struck like I should not have been struck how the digital advance is something of a regression. We have a population that has, say, doubled in the last so many decades but the volume and variety of entertainments has exploded. And, while the technological advances have been impressive, has the content kept up? Is it possible that there could be so many more things with which to be entertained or informed without a relative dilution of the actual quality of content?

What have we given up due to the dilution? Audio fidelity in favour of tiny ear plugs. The ability to value excellence in favour of the ability to value what we choose or, worse, what we do. Even TV as a topic for water cooler talk is dumped in favour of the replacement of water cooler talk, the SuperNetWay. We have exchanged audience for authorship and awarded each of ourselves the same prize. Except maybe for Harper as Dad. For him there is that world of kids playing in a fort (without any explanation of who maintains it and on what budget) and helping with some sort of government administrative function in relation to lands and forests (despite the child labour laws). There is something back there in that show which is not here – the suspension of disbelief, that awareness that what your are taking is has acceptable flaws.

But we are such mooks now – suckered by belief in whatever we have placed before ourselves. All it takes is for a new self-flattering toy or medium to come along to make ourselves earnestly believe we must have it. And so with politics – we are so determined to be a vital player in the administration of government that we value our whim is as good as a policy borne of the toil of hundreds and the rulings of decades. We can no longer suspend our disbelief as consumers or citizens but are locked into our own certainty in relation to all things, creating a flat world where anything is pretty much as good as any other thing. We cannot defer. We must each be authority if we are also the personalize me. So no journalist is worth their salt, no policy can be trusted, no means to assert our own personal dominion of expression can dared be passed up. We each pick at the world yet pick each our own world. Less shared, less trusted. More me-like-ness.

Sometimes I think that the few years of this millenium have seen two changes which have melded unexpectedly: the rise of networked information technology and the rise of the fear and the security demand in response to terrorism despite almost five years now passing since, hopefully, the anomaly of 9/11 that shook us out of the sleep and pattern of tens upon tens being blown up here and there on a regular basis between nation upon nation, tribe upon tribe genocides. We can forget sometimes that there was life and community and many of the same problems in 2000, 1999 and before. We trick ourselves that all has been changed. About a year ago I wondered if we were post post 9/11. I wondered it again a few months later, the day before the bombings in London. But maybe the trick is on us, that the uni-mind of internet and homogenization of shared concern has left us burned a bit, blurred a bit even as we technologically assert our individual autonomy. So concerned with our fear of flying – even while we are on the ground – that we now have met unending earnestness and each of us shaken hands with it and made it our own. I thought there was an end to irony in the weeks after September 11th but now I think we lost more than just that as tools of surveillance and information merge in the one screen wired to the network, taking and giving, providing what we can say we have made up ourselves. We must believe now, nothing left to be suspended. Where would you stand during the suspension?

What to do? Doesn’t anyone think this is just a town full of losers to be blown out of? Maybe Steve does. Is the Harper family gathering around the black and white world of the past one way to assert the contrarian way? I still think it is a little sad but I don’t know why exactly. I wish them well.

Friday Chat-A-Rama

Stumped no more. Shoeless Jones left a very wise if brief comment:

There is more to life than the three Bs; beer, baseball and bullshit!

That is true. Friday has become the highlight of the week chez nous for the inexplicable reason (say that like Daffy Duck) of the mere use of bullets rather than posts. As the coffee drips in the pot and soon into the brain I write:

  • The TV ratings for the Winter Olympics are apparently going to be the worst since 1906. It makes sense to me. I have not sat and gawked at the glowing screen and thin folk in lycra once. This weekend we are even going into enemy territory to catch the SLU v. Yale mens hockey game at Canton and then on to Oswego where they may not even have CBC on the cable system. Just Al Michaels. The horror. The horror. He even contextualizes this man to a degree. Fortunately, our hat, illustrated, is doing well:

    “We’ve replenished our stock twice already,” said a frazzled Kristina Panko, a service manager for HBC in Sudbury brought to Turin to work the B.C. House branch. “The hat’s so popular because it’s such an obvious symbol of Canada. But even at home, when I called the other day, they told me the stores had sold out.” The trapper hat is the “it” item of jock – and pseudo-jock – apparel in Turin. “It’s the trendy item of the Games,” said Curtis Runions, a 27-year-old native of Kingston, Ont., who has come to town from England, where he’s a high school teacher, to watch some hockey. “Maybe the fad will pass, like it did with the newsboy hats in Nagano, when everybody had one. But right now it’s the thing to have.”

    More sports of all kinds on Deadspin, my new joke-stealing source.

  • It is also true about Fridays. Friday used to be a statistical dead zone and I could never figure out why there would be an 80% drop in activity. Given that bots never sleep, this was weird as I would ahve though Friday was the idlest day of all. Not for me…others…that’s it. And there have been other shifts in the stats. I used to get up to 12,000 visits a day from 1,600 to 2,000 visitors. Now I get 7,500 visits from 2,000 to 2,500 visitors. I have no idea what it means. I have heard a few references to last August (when GX40 numbers hit a peak) as the top month for others. Maybe that was the crest of the blogosphere. Just a few comments to 50,000, by the way.
  • On the three Bs mentioned above, there is lots of stuff that never gets written down here that falls into the categories of family and work. I think that it is prudent but also I generally like to make up stuff so that no one can really call me out on any particular fact. So while I try to write daily, it is not as fact based as, say, John Gushue’s excellent Dot Dot Dot, as excellent a radio reference as there ever was.
  • I am as state pro-bureaucracy as they come in the sense I am not a knee-jerker against public money going to public needs through public service. [Ed.: Yes, I know…how did we ever get the class “D” bloggers license?] I believed this consistently when I was in the self-aggrandizing private sector. Yet…there is this thing called the CRTC and I have learned, if this is possible, to love them less this morning:

    The CRTC said yesterday that Canadian telephone customers have been overbilled to the tune of $652.7-million over the past few years, but the money will not be going back to them. The federal regulator ruled instead that telecommunications companies such as Bell Canada and Telus Corp. should use most of the money — equivalent to about $50 a customer — to expand offerings in underserved markets, primarily rural and remote communities.

    I want my fifty bucks, please. MY fifty bucks.

  • I like Jean Charest. I think he is going to go to junior partner in a 2 person caucus in 1993 to one of the great players in whatever changes are going to occur in Canada. Note this in the Globe:

    In the recent election campaign, Mr. Harper promised Canadians that he would work with the premiers to develop a guarantee on patient waiting times ensuring that Canadians receive essential treatment within clinically acceptable time frames. The cost of the pledge, said Mr. Harper, would have to be borne by the provinces under former prime minister Paul Martin’s $41-billion, 10-year plan for health care, signed in 2004. Yesterday, however, the Quebec Premier made it clear that he doesn’t expect to pick up the cost of his provincial program on his own. The gauntlet now dropped, Mr. Harper will have to decide whether to modify his promise and help pay for the program, or bite the bullet and disappoint Quebec, and probably other provinces, too.

    Good job. We all didn’t sign up for Team Stevie. 63.5% didn’t. I think we are going to look to the premiers as much as the opposition in the House to hold them to account.

There. That is a start. Chat dammit chat.